| Tobacco use is a serious public health problem worldwide,manifested by the high health risks of smoking,the high prevalence of smoking,and the low rates of successful quitting.A major cause of the difficulty in quitting smoking and relapse is the low intention to quit smoking.Episodic future thinking(EFT)has a strong adaptive function and may play an important role in increasing the intention to quit smoking and improving smoking behavior.According to Construal Level theory and The Dual Systems Model of Self-control,when people imagine future scenarios,they activate future time-oriented states and thus change their subjective value judgments about current cigarette rewards and future health risks,and tend to make future-oriented behavioral decisions from a longer-term and more rational perspective.However,previous studies mainly concentrated on investigating the role of EFT in impulsivity,craving,or smoking behavior,have rarely explored the impact of intention to quit smoking.In addition,the imagery of future events was limited to generalized life events,and there was a lack of refinement of EFT across different content and types,e.g.,the effect of EFT-health goal/EFT-general on intention to quit smoking was not identified,and they were not clearly distinguished in goal-directed process/outcome EFT on increasing intention to quit smoking.In summary,this study designed three sub-studies to examine the effects of episodic recent thinking(ERT)/EFT,the effect of EFT-health goal/EFT-general,and goal-directed process/outcome EFT on the intention to quit smoking.Experiment 1 aimed to examine the effect of situational thinking at different temporal distances on the intention to quit smoking.The experiment selected 60 male smokers and used a 2(situational thinking type: EFT /ERT)x 2(test order: pre-test /post-test)mixed experimental design.Situational thinking was manipulated through an imagery generation task.The intention to smoke,intention to quit smoking,and action plan to quit scales were used to examine differences in smokers’ intentions to quit smoking in the EFT/ERT condition.The results showed that:(1)Compared with ERT,EFT group had a lower intention to smoke.(2)There was no significant difference in the intentions to quit smoking and smoking action plan under the two conditions of ERT and EFT.Experiment 2 aimed to examine the effect of EFT-health goal/EFT-general on the intention to quit smoking.A mixed experimental design of 2(Episodic future thinking type: EFT-health goal/EFT-general)x 2(test order: pre-test/post-test)was used to examine the intention to smoke and intention to quit under both EFT-health goal and EFT-general conditions in 68 male smokers.The results showed that:(1)Compared with EFT-general,the EFT-health goal group had a lower intention to smoke,and a higher intention to quit smoking.(2)There was no significant difference in smoking action plans under the two conditions of EFT-health goal/EFT-general.Experiment 3 aimed to examine the effect of goal-directed process/outcome EFT on the intention to quit smoking.The experiment selected 66 male smokers and used a2(Episodic future thinking: goal-directed process/outcome EFT)x 2(test order: pretest/post-test)mixed experimental design to examine the intention to smoke,and intention to quit under both conditions of goal-directed process/outcome EFT.The results showed that: Compared with the goal-directed outcome EFT,goal-directed process EFT group had a lower intention to smoke,a higher intention to quit smoking and smoking action plan.The following conclusions are reached in this study:(1)EFT was more effective than ERT in reducing the intention to smoke.(2)EFT-health goal was more effective than EFT-general in reducing the intention to smoke and improving the intention to quit smoking.(3)Goal-directed process EFT was more effective than goal-directed outcome EFT on reducing the intention to smoke and improving the intention to quit smoking and action plan. |
